The juxtaposition could not be more fitting with all that is transpiring at this moment in economic history. On Monday, the headlines were filled with, Black Friday Fizzles as Sales Tumble 11% and ‘Black Friday’ Fades as Weekend Retail Sinks 11%. Then the “employment” report comes out and now the headlines are, More Jobs and Higher Wages: U.S. Recovery Starts [...]
Honestly, there really isn’t much to say now that hasn’t already been said. At what point can we expect convention and mainstream commentary to stop referring to monetarism as “stimulus”? If we are to have a unified and ubiquitous qualifying description of the idea, it is far closer to toxin or poison than anything that suggests positivity. Nominal is meaningless, which [...]
It has been lost to history now, but the first stirring of rational expectations theory was something like daylight savings time. “Experts” posited that there could be calendar effects lurking in behavior that might be exploited with the right kind of regulatory agenda and even interference in something so established as Thanksgiving itself. As Pat Horan at RealClearHistory details, FDR [...]
The largest calendar segments of the retail universe are back-to-school followed closely by Christmas. The peak month for back-to-school is August which is usually the third or fourth biggest month of the year in terms of raw retail sales; with October right behind as Christmas retailing ramps up. September, which falls in between back-to-school and Christmas (at least historically), was [...]
The other part of payrolls, the far more important piece actually, is of course wages and income. Here there is nothing to speak of an increase in the jobs market to anything like what the Establishment Survey suggests. To that end, disconnect is apparent when comparing wage rates with (adjusted) estimates for utilization: The average hourly wage has been stuck [...]
It should not have come as a surprise to convention that the PCE component of GDP was not going to be leading economic gains. The monthly PCE series has been “better” in later 2014 than the winter, but that is far too narrow a context in which to draw any conclusions. No matter how you measure, American consumers continue to [...]
To add another point to my earlier post on price changes and spending/revenue patterns, Gallup’s various economic polls show what I think are exactly the same problems. In the daily spending poll, the amount of self-reported spending has not really grown going all the way back to February 2013. Twenty months of largely stagnation is worse than it sounds given [...]
With all of the credit market fireworks that leaked into stocks, the pace of economic reassurance from “authorities” has been rather steady and a bit more emphatic. Despite the attempts at managing perceptions, there has been very little actual success in persuading. In many ways this is like the unfolding ebola drama in that there is a palpable disconnect between [...]
I’m not too sure about the relationship between skipping dental appointments and the tendency of markets to crash, but in terms of gaining some anecdotal insight into economic function and consistency there may be some value in tracking something like that. As I noted on a couple prior occasions, the movie business, for example, has spun a horrendous 2014 starting [...]
The payroll and labor data from September is not appreciably different from that of August, despite the large disparity in how each was received. Nothing has changed as far as the inconsistencies in the internal data pieces. The Establishment Survey endures in a straight line as it has for years. The Household Survey continues to undercount such job growth, still [...]
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